Surveillance Nation

Surveillance Nation

Webcams, tracking devices, and interlinked databases are leading to the elimination of unmonitored public space. Are we prepared for the consequences of the intelligence-gathering network we’re unintentionally building?

Route 9 is an old two-lane highway that cuts across Massachusetts from Boston in the east to Pittsfield in the west. Near the small city of Northampton,the highway crosses the wide Connecticut River.The Calvin Coolidge Memorial Bridge, named after the president who once served as Northampton’s mayor, is a major regional traffic link.When the state began a long-delayed and still-ongoing reconstruction of the bridge in the summer of 2001, traffic jams stretched for kilometers into the bucolic New England countryside.

In a project aimed at alleviating
drivers’ frustration, the University of
Massachusetts Transportation Center,
located in nearby Amherst, installed eight
shoe-size digital surveillance cameras
along the roads leading to the bridge.
Six are mounted on utility poles and the
roofs of local businesses. Made by Axis
Communications in Sweden, they are
connected to dial-up modems and transmit images of the roadway before them to
a Web page, which commuters can check
for congestion before tackling the road.
According to Dan Dulaski, the system’s
technical manager, running the entire
webcam system—power, phone, and
Internet fees—costs just $600 a month.
The other two cameras in the
Coolidge Bridge project are a little less
routine. Built by Computer Recognition
Systems in Wokingham, England, with
high-quality lenses and fast shutter speeds
(1/10,000 second), they are designed to photograph every car and truck that
passes by. Located eight kilometers apart,
at the ends of the zone of maximum traffic congestion, the two cameras send
vehicle images to attached computers,
which use special character-recognition
software to decipher vehicle license plates.
The license data go to a server at the
company’s U.S. office in Cambridge, MA, about 130 kilometers away. As each
license plate passes the second camera,the
server ascertains the time difference
between the two readings. The average of
the travel durations of all successfully
matched vehicles defines the likely travel
time for crossing the bridge at any given
moment, and that information is posted
on the traffic watch Web page

To local residents, the traffic data are
helpful, even vital: police use the information to plan emergency routes. But as
the computers calculate traffic flow, they
are also making a record of all cars that
cross the bridge—when they do so, their
average speed, and (depending on lighting and weather conditions) how many
people are in each car.

Trying to avoid provoking privacy
fears, Keith Fallon, a Computer Recognition Systems project engineer, says,
“we’re not saving any of the information we capture. Everything is deleted
immediately.” But the company could
change its mind and start saving the
data at any time. No one on the road
would know

The Coolidge Bridge is just one of
thousands of locations around the planet
where citizens are crossing—willingly,
more often than not—into a world of
networked, highly computerized surveillance.According to a January report by J.P.
Freeman, a security market-research firm
in Newtown, CT, 26 million surveillance
cameras have already been installed worldwide, and more than 11 million of them
are in the United States. In heavily moni-
tored London, England, Hull University
criminologist Clive Norris has estimated,
the average person is filmed by more than
300 cameras each day.

The $150 million-a-year remote
digital-surveillance-camera market will
grow, according to Freeman, at an
annual clip of 40 to 50 percent for the
next 10 years. But astonishingly, other,
non-video forms of monitoring will
increase even faster. In a process that
mirrors the unplanned growth of the
Internet itself, thousands of personal,
commercial, medical, police, and government databases and monitoring sys-
tems will intersect and entwine.
Ultimately, surveillance will become so
ubiquitous, networked, and searchable
that unmonitored public space will effectively cease to exist.